21

FURRENSICS

Are you insane?” I was addressing Bernard Wright, but I was looking at Nikolai “The Saw” Sokolov, a man who had been a professional heavyweight fighter a decade earlier. He had never been a world champion, but he’d fought for the title once, and anyone who followed boxing would know him.

Nikolai had grown some thick black hair over the skull he used to keep bald and had shaved off his old hybrid trident moustache-and-goatee arrangement, but he was still recognizably “The Saw.” Six foot five tends to stand out, and the scar tissue he’d gained before becoming a werewolf had never healed. His face looked like one big callus.

I really was furious. Famous people are supposed to be off-limits to supernatural predators. Do you have any idea how much grief Elvis caused before a knight finally put him down years after his official obituary? He generated so much attention that the public actually started creating Elvis tulpas—walking, talking Elvis duplicates that were manifestations of concentrated psychic energy from some kind of group dream mind. The knights only got the whole situation under control by coming up with the concept of Elvis impersonators.

Bernard winced as if passing a gas bubble. “Crazy or not, I had nothing to do with Nikolai. Some young, dumb, full-of-come werewolf wanted to test his abilities out and jumped Nikolai outside his gym. As fast and strong as a lycanthrope is, Nikolai was still giving the kid a beatdown, and the idiot panicked and changed and bit Nikolai. I just took Nikolai in.”

We had driven to an area where the woods were much thicker, the cover of trees so dense that a few hours after sunrise, it almost looked like evening. The pungent, bittersweet stench of burning marijuana clung to the air, trapped in a hazy limbo between leaves and ground. I pulled my arms out of the sleeves of my T-shirt, then tugged the collar of it over my nose and tied the sleeves behind my neck so that I had a mask and air filter of sorts. What I was smelling wasn’t the aftereffect of someone’s recreational use. Entire fields of dope had been burned in the area recently.

Nikolai, for his part, grunted while suspicion and hostility trickled off of him. “I told Bernard he was crazy when I heard about you too.”

We weren’t the only three people there, even if it seemed like it at the moment. There was a crew of firefighters made up entirely of werewolves running about, which showed a degree of foresight on Bernard’s part that I found a little disturbing. Lee was also on scene, whatever his capacity in the Forest Service, and I kept catching glimpses and whiffs of at least four other werewolves out in the woods around us, presumably on guard detail. I also spotted Gabriel, Muscles, and Uni-brow, three of my escorts from the Templar safe house. Or unsafe house. They were standing near a body where Mayte had joined them, all heavily armed and wearing Kevlar vests.

“Nikolai is my left hand,” Bernard informed me.

“Is that the one you jerk off with?” I asked.

Nikolai considered hitting me, and unlike most people he probably could have, but Bernard defused the moment by laughing ruefully. “Nikolai is my backup. He takes care of things behind the scenes while people are watching my right hand.”

“Who’s your right hand?” I asked diffidently.

“My mate.” Bernard didn’t gaze off into the distance dreamily when he said that, and I didn’t hear any lutes or harps. “Catherine.”

“I can see where you would be great at operating behind the scenes without being noticed,” I observed to Nikolai. “You’re so indistinct and easy to overlook.”

Nikolai smiled. It was a remarkably unfriendly expression. Nikolai was at least four inches taller than me and outweighed me by somewhere between seventy and a hundred pounds, not much of it fat.

“Nikolai wants to beat you into a coma and rip your head off,” Bernard announced casually. “He thinks you’re here to gather information on the Clan and assassinate me. It’s time to show Nikolai why you’re valuable. Something has killed one of the Clan. I want you to take a look at the scene.”

“Grace will be here this evening,” Nikolai reminded him.

“Grace is one of us and a coroner,” Bernard explained to me. “She’s been busy lately.”

I was tired of listening to them argue while pretending to talk to me. “Okay.” Making Bernard follow me wasn’t exactly werewolf protocol, but I walked off toward the body.

“Give me the word,” Nikolai breathed to Bernard. He knew I could hear him.

“Shush,” Bernard murmured, which meant they were old friends or more than friends. A hard man who is a leader among tough guys doesn’t tell another tough guy “Shush” unless they’re close. He says “Be quiet” or some cruder variation of it, ranging anywhere from “Shut up” to “Don’t open your mouth unless you want me to put my dick in it.”

Hey, I don’t make the rules.

The dead werewolf was stiff and posed in a state that was half man and half wolf, which was crazy yet somehow true. When a werewolf dies, it reverts to its human form, period. Not semicolon, period. But this werewolf was caught in a hybrid state, naked and randomly covered in thick tufts of fur, its nose and mouth not quite a muzzle, claws emerging from human-looking hands instead of fingernails. One of its human ears was visible and slightly pointed, and its human teeth were a little too long. The man-wolf was frozen, a sculpture of agony. It had actually clenched its fists so tight that it had driven its claws through its own palms. Oddly enough, those hands were covered with black ash, though the body was some distance away from where crop fields had been burned. It had a massive wound in its stomach and a hole where its heart had been torn out of its chest. The top of its skull was crushed and gray matter was splattered over the ground. Someone had literally beaten its brains out.

Removing either the heart or the brain from a werewolf will kill it. The heart needs the brain to command it to keep pumping blood. The brain needs blood from the heart to keep sending out commands for the werewolf’s body to regenerate. Neither organ regenerates fast enough to keep the other from shutting down if either is completely and violently removed.

Oddly enough, the sight of the body calmed me down. I could sense old coping mechanisms and defenses sliding over me like a second skin now that I was back on familiar territory. It was a relief, feeling unfeeling, and I stuck my right hand into the dead thing’s stomach wound and probed. “I’m guessing we’ve crossed the border into the Chequamegon park reserve?”

“Does that matter?” Bernard asked curiously.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. All of the land around us had been ancient Native American hunting territory at some point, but names have power.

“No, it doesn’t matter,” Nikolai muttered. “Not if a spy among us managed to send some kind of signal to the knights about where we are.”

“The knights had nothing to do with this.” My tone was clinical as I examined the padded areas between the man-wolf’s finger/toes. “They’ll only have the element of surprise once. They wouldn’t waste it on a lone guard. When they come, it will either be a massive attack on everyone or a surgical strike to take out Bernard.”

“When they come?” Bernard asked. “Not if?”

“I call it the way I see it,” I said. “And speaking of how I see things, I didn’t realize I was hanging out with drug dealers.”

Bernard’s air of sangfroid frayed a little. Is that called sangfrayed? “We have a lot of side operations that generate income off the grid. It takes money to buy military-grade weapons, and it can’t be money that the IRS can track, either.”

I was still absorbing that when Bernard returned to the subject at hand. “What do you think we’re dealing with here?”

“A bakaak.” I pronounced the word “beh-kuck” but that might not be right. I’ve never heard the word said out loud by a native Ojibwe speaker.

There was an uncomfortable silence all around.

I ran through some other names from some other Native American languages I didn’t know. “Baykok? Pekak? Baguck? You know, undead Native American hunters? Skeleton-looking things? Invisible flesh but their bones are still visible? Any of this buzzing your apartments?”

Even Gabriel looked blank. I guess they hadn’t told him a lot of Native American legends in his Catholic orphanage.

“Enlighten us,” Bernard suggested dryly.

I wiped my hand on the dead werewolf’s shirt and tried. “According to legends, bakaak are undead Native Americans who became obsessed with hunting. As far as I know, it’s not spelled out, but there’s at least an implication that bakaaks started hunting men for sport. They definitely murdered among their own tribe at some point. It might be that becoming a bakaak was a divine punishment. It might be that bakaaks are men who became so caught up in the hunt that they only walked the spirit paths halfway—then turned around and came back to this earth to keep hunting.”

“Hunting what?” Bernard asked softly.

“Anything challenging or dangerous,” I said. “A bakaak wouldn’t bother with a random hiker, but it might hunt an armed werewolf who had violated its territory.”

Uni-brow interrupted. “How do we know you’re not talking out of your ass?”

“Bakaaks use a paralyzing poison on their arrows, kind of a like a spider’s venom.” I indicated the body at our feet. “Then they eat their victims while they’re still conscious. That’s why your crop guard is still half wolf. The paralyzing toxin is slowing his body’s change.”

“I don’t see any arrow wounds,” Nikolai said grimly.

“It shot him here, then used a knife to enlarge the wound.” I indicated the gaping wound in the stomach. “Among a lot of Native American tribes, the liver was the prize that belonged to the successful hunter. Lots of vitamins. This man’s liver is missing, and when I stuck my hand in to check, the tip of my index finger went numb.”

I held up the finger in question. “There must have been a trace of the paralyzing poison left in some kind of hollow or bone.”

“Is that all?” Bernard asked curiously.

What? That wasn’t enough?

“No, that’s not all,” I said evenly. “Do you smell anything? This thing used something with an ammonia base, probably some kind of distilled urine, to destroy scent molecules. You see any tracks? It swept the ground and burned it to mess with our infravision. This thing was expecting werewolves. That should tell you this is a badass hunter even if you don’t know what a bakaak is.”

I began pointing to the scene. “And see the way the guard’s brains are splattered? In all the stories I’ve ever heard, a bakaak’s hand-to-hand weapon is a war club. Bakaaks hunt at night, and this happened last night.”

“Yeah, but…” Uni-brow began.

I held up a thin shred of translucent membrane to silence him, then passed it to Bernard, who took it carefully. “And I found this between your guard’s knuckles. It probably got wedged there when its digits were closer together and matted with fur.”

“Invisible skin,” Bernard said softly.

“That’s why the bakaak hunts at night,” I noted. “They don’t dissolve in the sun like vampires, but transparent skin doesn’t protect against sunburn, and their eyes don’t see as well in the day.”

“But it could attack during the day if it wanted to?” Bernard asked.

“That’s what knight lore says,” I told him. “In an area like this with thick tree cover? I wouldn’t bet my life on the bakaak not coming out to play early.”

Bernard’s eyes narrowed. “You think it’s coming back?”

I nodded. “See how it poured black ash all over your guard’s hands? That’s a message. One of the associations of the name bakaak is to pound black ash.”

Mayte jumped in. “You just said it did all those things to hide itself. Why would it leave a message?”

Were they really this slow? “Would any of you have gotten that? The clue was meant for another hunter. This is the bakaak’s way of saying game on.”

But Bernard wasn’t interested in the bakaak, at least not for the moment. “Can all knights do this?”

“Do what?” I wasn’t being a smart-ass. I was in my hyperfocus mode, and the question wasn’t specific enough.

“You just put all that together in less than a minute with no lab equipment, no clues from your werewolf senses, and no Internet searches,” Bernard pointed out. “You took one look at that body and identified the killer, its motive, and its probable next move, like some kind of Sherlock Holmes, except those stories make him look brilliant, and you make it look like anyone who read the right Wikipedia article could have figured it out. I’m standing here feeling stupid, and I’m not stupid. Can all knights do what you just did?”

“Probably not as fast,” I admitted.

“And you think this is supposed to make me feel better?!?” Nikolai was confronting Bernard. He had moved so that he was back in Bernard’s field of vision while keeping me at an angle. “If I was a knight, this dude is exactly who I would send to spy on us!”

“Uh, could you maybe wait and talk about whether or not to kill me later?” I asked. “We’re on the bakaak’s hunting ground, and this thing is serious.”

“How serious?” Bernard asked.

I gestured at the body at our feet. “The black ash is a sign. It’s werewolf season.”